The Best Shape for Your At-Home Bar

A morning tip for today. And probably tomorrow, too.

Getty Images

Dec 10, 2013

So you want to build a bar for your home. Good idea. But over at Serious Eats, there might be a better take on what you're already thinking about—that classic L-shape, with a space behind it for the server, like at an actual bar.

But that's not the best model, they convincingly argue, because you keep on having to walk a long way to and from behind that bar to greet house guests and then return to tending. But there is an an alternative. (Unlike them, we're going to just discount an island counter off hand, because it's not a bar. Perfectly useful in its own right—but not a bar.) Instead, you should invert the L shape, so that long end pushes up to a wall; then the short end becomes your work space and serving area. That'll allow you to easily enter and exit the space, and give that air of bartender authority that you're looking for.